


this is the beginning or the end of the world

by minarchy



Category: Tomb Raider (Video Game), Uncharted
Genre: Crossover, F/F, International Women's Day, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-10
Updated: 2016-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-25 23:22:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6214240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minarchy/pseuds/minarchy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“So?” she says, once Lara has grabbed her forearm and helped haul her back to (relative) safety. For a reporter, Elena is suspiciously good at this.</p>
<p>“This isn’t your first time,” Lara says, “doing something like this.”</p>
<p>“Oh good,” Elena says. “For a moment I thought you were going somewhere else entirely."</p>
            </blockquote>





	this is the beginning or the end of the world

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't played/watched a playthrough of uncharted 4 or rise of the tomb raider; this is supposedly set between u2 and u3 and at some indefinable moment post tomb raider. i was poking at gdocs drafts and got stuck and wanted to write something easy, so i wrote this for international women's day and then forgot to post it out of my drafts
> 
> im also far too lazy to do any research on an actual mythical object which is why vague and handwavy. also, i claim no actual knowledge about biofilm in caves
> 
> unbeta'd because im lonely. please feel free to point out (and forgive) any mistakes

     _you know again that behind that wall,_  
_under the uncut hair of the willows_  
  
_something secret is going on,_  
_so marvelous and dangerous_  
  
_that if you crawled through and saw,_  
_you would die, or be happy forever._  
  
_**— Lisel Muller, Sometimes, When the Light**_

 

Elena is feeling antsy and too big for her skin, which might be because the climate is too hot and then suddenly too cold, all at once; but probably has more to with the fact that she’s chasing a story, hot and hard, feeling like she has something for the first time since Jeff died.

The fact that she is, once again, chasing a story that is actually a person, and that person is ostensibly an archaeologist but, in all reality, is more likely a grave robber, doesn’t escape her notice. She’s ignoring it, though, very hard, so that has to count for something.

 

 

Honestly, it’s a miracle that the woman managed to tail Lara this long; she’s been tracked by far more terrible and tenacious people, most of whom want to kill her, and it really should have been easier to lose her. This is her first clue.

The second comes when the woman, filthy and sweat-stained, steps into the small puddle of warmth cast by her fire and says,

“From your reputation, I thought you’d’ve found this Hand thing by now.” She sits herself down and eyes Lara’s meal, roasting on the fire. “Can I have some?”

Lara’s so surprised that she agrees without really meaning to.

“You’re a reporter,” she says, watching as the woman tears the flesh from the bird leg with her fingers before eating it.

The woman grins at her, eyes glinting in the firelight. “How did you guess,” she says.

 

“So,” says the woman, who had introduced herself as Elena and held out her hand, slick with meat juices for Lara to shake, “what’s with this Hand thing anyway?” Lara look at her, assessingly, from where their bedrolls line up next to the flames. 

“According to legend,” she says, “it is the hand of the war god, and can rip men’s souls from their bodies.”

“Of course,” Elena says, counting off on her fingers, “gods, souls; what else, did it send an empire crumbling into ruin? Is it possessed by the dead spirits of warriors of yore?”

Lara blinks at her, and then smiles slightly to herself, caught off guard. “It’s also apparently made from solid gold,” she says.

“Ah hah,” says Elena, as if that is the answer to everything.

 

“So,” says Elena, panting as she follows Lara up the steep not-path on the side of the cliff, “what are your plans for this demon hand of solid gold?”

The next bit of the cliff looks rather tricky to navigate: a large jut of rock sticks out into the path that isn’t, strictly speaking, a path as opposed to the trail that the mountain goats use to clamber up to the cliff top, where there is sweet grass to be had. Lara spent days watching them from the forest below, memorising their route. Elena is keeping up surprisingly well, for a reporter.

Lara is hanging out over the sheer drop of what might easily be three hundred feet by her fingertips. “What do you mean?” she says, concentrating on her next foothold and wishing she was a mountain goat and could just bounce up the cliff. Or a bird; that would be even better.

“You know,” Elena says. “Are you going to steal it, or sell it, or use it for your own evil machinations for the complete enslavement of mankind—” She trails off, waving a hand, _et cetera_ , watching Lara carefully as she works her way back to safer footing.

“The usual,” agrees Lara.

“The usual,” agrees Elena, catching the rope that Lara tosses back round to her.

 

“So?” she says, once Lara has grabbed her forearm and helped haul her back to (relative) safety. For a reporter, Elena is suspiciously good at this.

“This isn’t your first time,” Lara says, “doing something like this.”

“Oh good,” Elena says. “For a moment I thought you were going somewhere else entirely. You never answered my question,” she adds. 

“I don’t want to steal it,” Lara says, distracted by the thoughts of what Elena might have meant by ‘somewhere else entirely’. “I want to see if it’s real.”

 

“I’m guessing those guys aren’t your friends,” Elena says, squinting into the sun with a hand shading her eyes, “come to pick us up in that nice, shiny Chinook and fly us the rest of the way up the mountain.”

The men in the helicopter had a mounted machine gun, which was a little more firepower than Lara had wanted to haul up a fundamentally sheer cliff; as if to demonstrate this, they opened fire on them.

“Do you really think,” Lara shouts over the racket as they dive for cover, “that if I had friends with a Chinook who could fly us up this mountain, that I would bother climbing it?”

For some reason, Elena has a handgun in her pack. Lara isn’t complaining, especially when it turns out that Elena is a surprisingly good shot, but it is a little weird.

“I don’t know,” Elena shouts back, “you look like the kind of person who goes after a challenge just to see if you can do it.”

Which, to be fair.

 

“Okay,” says Lara, watching the flaming wreckage of the Chinook smash through the forest below.

“Right,” says Elena. “So, I’m guessing destroying a whole chunk of wildlife habitat wasn’t part of your plan.”

Lara squints, trying to see if any of the attackers made it out alive. Not that anyone should, realistically, be able to survive a giant steel fireball, but she had long since stopped listening to things that started _realistically_. “No,” she says, feeling a little bad about all the small deaths happening below her, and hoping it doesn’t burn out of control. “But it sort of keeps happening.”

“Yeah,” says Elena. “I get that.”

 

The entrance to the cavern where the temple is that holds the Hand is, unhelpfully, across a large ravine. It also appears to be accessible only down a small shaft in the rock. It’s times like these when Lara wonders if people ever actually came to worship at these altars, or if things were put there so no one could. It’s times like these when she really loves her job.

“Tell me something,” she says to Elena, whilst she tests the knot on her grappling hook and calculates the distance to force ration.

“You can ask,” says Elena, looking none too pleased about the depth of the space before them.

“Why are you following me?” Lara looks up from her hands to catch Elena’s gaze, searching. “Surely your story isn’t worth this.”

Elena doesn’t answer for a moment. She looks right back at Lara, assessing in her turn. Lara can’t read much from her expression, but that might be because the sun is bright and fierce above them, creating tan lines in the creases around Elena’s eyes.

Who grins, suddenly. “Apparently, I have a thing for reckless treasure hunters,” she says. “Not what I was voted in my high school yearbook, but hey, who knew.”

Lara frowns. “What were you voted?”

Elena’s grin turns sharp. “Most likely to succeed,” she says. “The ‘by any means necessary’ was left out, but heavily implied.”

 

“This is so gross,” Elena’s saying, from somewhere above Lara’s head. The rock shaft isn’t as tight as she’d anticipated, which is nice, because a lot of her expedition budget seems to go on buying new trousers. “Why are caves always slimy?”

“Mineral heavy water,” Lara replies. “Bacteria, algae and fungi thrive in this sort of environment.”

“I wasn’t actually looking for an answer,” Elena says, “but thanks for that information.”

“It’s pretty cool, actually,” says Lara. She’s always loved caves. “They can build up in layers and actually create rock formations.”

“Wait; shit,” Elena slips, braces, recovers her grip, “the slime _builds_ rocks?”

“Well,” Lara says, sliding elegantly down a smooth section and catches herself on the next grip. Not that she’s showing off. “No one is really sure.”

“By the power of Grayskull,” Elena mutters. “Wait,” she says, “wait, there isn’t going to be a legitimate river of slime down there, right? Because that would be too gross, honestly.”

 

There isn’t, in fact, a river of slime. Also, the Hand isn’t actually made of solid gold, but has a lot of gold veining like intricate tattoos, curling around the grey, petrified flesh.

Oh, and the souls it absorbed apparently possess the skeletons of the warriors left behind to guard it, but that’s barely worth mentioning. Just another day in the office.

 

“You really didn’t take it.” 

Elena sounds surprised, almost to the point of suspicion; Lara turns to find her looking at her, eyes narrowed. Lara shrugs.

“What good would it have done if I had?” she says. “Some idiot would have stolen it from whatever museum bought it from me, and done something spectacularly stupid with it.”

“Like raise a skeleton army to enslave and micromanage mankind?” Elena says.

“Or maybe just a small country,” Lara says.

Elena huffs a laugh, rolling out her shoulder and cracking her spine. “Yeah,” she says. “We should be so lucky. “A megalomaniac with a sense of proportion.”

“Stranger things have happened,” Lara says.

“Have they?” Elena says. Lara doesn’t really have an answer for that.

 

The sky is very clear above them, and the forest is very loud around them. Lara loves nights like these.

“So,” she says. Elena turns her face from the fire to look at her. “This wasn’t your first time. Doing something like this.”

“Oh,” says Elena. “I thought you were going somewhere else with that.”

Lara pauses, thinks, briefly, and then stops thinking. “Maybe I was,” she says. Elena is the one who leans in first. Her lips are chapped, and very soft. They kiss for a long moment, close-mouthed but not chaste.

“Maybe?” Elena says, moving away far enough so that her mouth doesn’t catch Lara’s when she speaks, but close enough that Lara can feel her breath, cool on the damp of her mouth. She kisses her again instead of replying.

“I totally have a type,” Elena says, her voice a moan when Lara pushes her mouth open and touches her tongue against Elena’s. Elena is slightly more aggressive, pressing her tongue along Lara’s and back into Lara’s mouth; a dance.

“Mm?” says Lara, one hand resting on Elena’s hip, fingers moving slowly under the edge of her shirt, the other on Elena’s neck, thumb on the join of her jaw and her ear.

“Reckless treasure hunters,” Elena says, although it’s more of a gasp, which is a giddy rush of power in Lara’s head and a throb the pit of her stomach, “who don’t know how to ask for what they want.”

What Lara wants right now, more than anything, is to press herself against the soft length of Elena’s body, feel her heat against the cool of the night, push a knee between Elena’s legs and rub, smooth and sweet, against her thigh. 

She doesn’t ask, but she does get.


End file.
